Enough Rope: Dubiety and queerness in Hannibal (NBC)

D. A. Miller introduced the concept of dubiety in his analysis of Hitchcock’s Rope to express the ways in which we construct queerness via doubt in film . Hannibal (NBC) took this dubiety/doubt and doubled down, playing with it, making it into a fan dance of dark camp on-screen that somehow enhances rather than closets queerness from the audience. Yet Hannibal ’s performance of queerness and deviance is highly dependent on whiteness and class; we would not be shocked at a cannibal who was not white and upper class, and Indigenous tropes mark both queerness and cannibalism. Fandom adds another dimension to this via a multi-layered performativity in which all possibilities (however homonormative or queering) are present at once through the multiplicity of fanfics/narratives. This enhances doubt/dubiety as no one reading can ever be utterly correct, enacting a kind of queer futurity through fandom practice.